The problem with Vonnegut's "Man Without a Country" is that you can't tell when he's kidding.
He says "The arts are not a way to make a living. They are a very human way of making life more bearable. Practising an art, no matter how well or how badly, is a way to make your soul grow, for heaven's sake.... Do it as well as you can. You will get an enormous reward. You will have created something."
The problem which arises when we attempt to turn the arts into a way of making a living, is that the larger social context breaks down. We make art out of our experiences. If your experiences are effectively owned by another party, you can make art out of your experiences, but then you won't entirely own the end result. Not even enough to give it away.
The soul-growing aspect of art is not its consumption, but the creative synthesis which art inspires. Art consumed is popcorn and butter. Nourishing in a caloric sense, but not nutritious.
At the risk of quoting a spoiler, Vonnegut recites the wisdom of his friend Saul at the end of the book, "what you respond to in any work of art is the artist's struggle against his or her limitations."
Thus, I suppose, breaking DRM is a form of art, and our response is to the plight of the artist's prison term.
But seriously, if you view the creative works of others as fuel for your own soul-growing endeavours, it's not sensible to become emotionally invested in creative works which are militantly encumbered.
Somewhere I encountered an anecdote about children given an amazing toy, but what they end up playing with most at the end of the day is the packaging the toy came in. I don't know anyone who was inspired to a life of artistic expression by the Mona Lisa. For that matter, it's debatable whether sex is improved with skill. Isn't skill mostly a compensation for the fact that the sequel rarely lives up to the original?
We're actually pretty bad at predicting our happiness states. Gilbert says the same thing in his videos at TED.
What I'm saying is that we too often talk ourselves into needing the latest and greatest (and most encumbered) media, but we don't, and it often defeats the greater purpose.
Lessig has figured out that this quandary is harming our children. Part of his motivation here is that we're making an ass of the law. I guess I have less to lose if RIAA succeeds, as seems likely.
The deeper problem here is that many of us believe that we garner status through what we've experienced, rather than what we've created, a sentiment which Twain noted when he observed that "A classic is something everybody wants to have read, but no one wants to read."
How much of this stuff are we hurtling through so that we can sit around at the bar or the coffee shop and go "yeah, I've seen that; yeah, I've read that; yeah, I've seen that, too"?
I've been to Holland. I spent two hours in Schiphol. I've been to Tokyo. I spent 12 hours in the Narita complex. We had long enough to take a train into the city and drink one beer.
Sometimes we get a bit carried away with the belief that a gadget from Amazon or an air terminal is the gateway to a life well lived. If you don't stick around and engage emotionally, it's all meaningless. The Kindle model is a form of literary tourism. Hey, if you love airport security, here's a chance to carry it around on your person.
Flash forward to Kubrick's AI when the love of our life disappears in an electronic instant (with full refund) due to a minor copyright glitch on the charming dimple module. I've love to read the verse Shakespeare might have penned concerning that scenario, but as things are shaping up, I'd have to live another 600 years to legally post it here on slashdot.
In an ideal world, I suppose, 386BSD would have been managed better and there would be no forks.
In your "ideal world" I suspect we would all be rather less well off.
I've never understood the appeal of one-size-fits all. Why is it the premise of so many off-the-cuff comments in every venue of discussion?
So far as I can see, it accomplishes two things: makes it easy to criticize others for not getting along, and relieves the commentator of having to learn or understand systems theory, which is subtle and difficult. If only the whales had not split off from the carnivorous ungulates, evolution, in the ideal world, would have accomplished so much more. Put into a real context, the idea barely parses.
Within the prokaryote kingdom, there is a great deal of horizontal gene transfer. Within the BSD clade, there is a great deal of horizontal transfer (of ideas and code) whenever the need arises.
The most profound fork is probably the GPL from the long-standing conventions of public domain, which the BSD license more nearly mimics.
I don't see much difference between the scope of source code and the scope of human interpersonal relationships. In an ideal world, we would all be better off if either A) all information was private, or B) all information was public. Turns out, some people have information they don't wish to share (for a list of reasons which includes every human motivation) so the GPL lacks universal appeal. Turns out, some people have information which they don't wish other people not to share, so neither does the BSD license have universal appeal.
Having the two license camps puts a crimp on horizontal transfer, but it hasn't caused the world to stop turning. Is it fundamentally a bad thing to implement an idea twice, beginning from two different sets of premises? Only if your goal is world domination. For maximizing insight, diversity rocks.
I could continue, but I'm sure the choir has already figured this out, and the sinners are set in their ways.
At the end of the day, fork has become a term of social derision founded upon a monolithic Garden of Eden which never existed, and wouldn't have been a paradise even if it had.
If the only reason to fork is that two parties can't get along (X, libc are possibilities, but I don't know enough of the story) then forking is a mite unseemly, much like a failed marriage. Do open source communities fork more often than any other walk of life? I suspect not. And no, I'm not counting whiner attrition, where one or two guys copy a code base into their own tree, make a dozen patches, and are never heard from again. Does IBM fork every time a deadbeat is fired or quits?
Many of these projects have accomplished things through volunteer collaboration that twenty years ago few would have believed possible, yet they are mostly criticized in retrospect for the occasional loud public spat prior to a parting of ways, by people who are deeply in touch with their inner primate.
Those of us in the results oriented camp are less inclined to praise the false nirvana of pretending to agree when you really don't.
For an interesting comparison, consider the disputes over the years within NASA over the "smaller, faster, cheaper" engineering meme.
I suspect smaller, faster, cheaper might work, but it won't ever be NASA who consistently pulls this off. NASA is what you get when an agency never forks. Ideal leaves a lot to be desired.
Lost is not being used as an adjective anymore in this statement. Lost is now being used as an identifier, a name for, the tapes. The only purpose of calling them the lost tapes is to differentiate them from the other tapes they previously had.
And you know what, this is all completely obvious to anyone who never completed grade school. There's something about how grammar is first taught in elementary and junior school that leads to the kind of delayed-onset petulant pedanticism where someone regaining a "lost tape" is cited as logically inconsistent.
Any normal person makes the map from "lost tape" to "tape that was lost" a hundred times a day in the course of normal social relationships. Even people not regarded as representing the fat part of the Bell curve. Kasparov said some silly things about Deep Blue, but he never went around making absurd comments on language like some kind of cyborg dialed up way past Cmdr Data for propositional logic.
The lost coin is found, the lost sheep regathered, the lost son returns. Except in The Changeling, which is a difficult movie to watch. Had to keep track of fact that "lost son" meant different things to different people in almost every scene. Amazing the mind doesn't completely melt down in the face of so much contradiction. The only character whose mind was completely unclouded by ambiguity was the doctor in the psychiatric ward. I wouldn't risk use of the phrase "lost tapes" in the company of that man. His M.O. was that any ordinary ellipsis or circumlocution was a treasonable psychosis. He'd fit in well here.
Yes, the purpose of bubble sort is to prove theorems. I recall reading that bubble sort was introduced as an *optimal* algorithm on a Turing machine. Yet schools manage to teach bubble sort without commenting on its odd status, as if it one of the sorting methods found in every programmer's tool box. I haven't written a bubble sort once in two decades. Quick sort, heap sort, radix sort, and insertion sort are the real work horses.
Speaking of radix sort, a wise CS student puts an asterisk beside the claim that the algorithmic complexity of sorting is O(N log N). While this is formally true, the merits of "formally true" in this case are greatly overstated.
If you look at the ratio of L1 cache size to physical memory on almost any machine made in the last thirty years, you'll find that for sorting a list of primitive scalar elements (machine integers, pointers, or floating point) you almost never need more than a 3-pass radix sort.
A 16kB L1 cache will hold 2^11 long integers. A three pass radix sort is good for up to 2^33 elements. A 64kB L1 cache increases your three-pass list size to 2^45 elements. The day you install your first 1TB memory stick, do you think your L1 cache will be smaller than 64K? Any takers?
The performance of radix sort on any practical machine is as follows:
O (N log (N, base=N^(1/k))) = O (k N)
where k is usually 2 or 3, and hardly ever greater than 4 (for the situations where radix sort is preferred), unless you are talking about a class of machine never constructed where bubble sort is theoretically optimal.
Theory is good, but hone your BS detector.
Also, bear in mind that if your CS detector poses the exam question, as one of my Waterloo instructors once did, to draw circles, squares, and triangles around the automatic, static, and heap based allocations in a C program according to the convention on page 200 of your mandatory text book, the only thing your instructor is teaching you is what's easiest for him to test.
That text book was crap, I never cracked the cover once after I dismissed it, so I didn't know that the circle is the universal conceptual designation of a static variable.
One factor is whether the syllabus is conceptual or applied, the other factor is whether the teaching itself is meaningful or a meaningless exercise in jumping hoops.
I was arguing that we'd have been better off if Microsoft hadn't dominated it, teaching everyone to expect crappy software.
Interesting, if not particularly insightful. And potentially naive.
It's quite possible that during the exponential phase of the PC revolution, that "race to the bottom" was the dominant economic paradigm, and the winner, whoever it turned out to be, was the corporation to first or most deeply grasp this central economic fact.
To make this discussion concrete, IMO the exponential adoption phase concerns the period of time from the early 386 through to a low-end Athlon running Windows 2000.
Prior to the 386, people bought PCs more on potential than reality. It was a skill you wanted to have to stay in business a year or two down the road, but in fact it probably cost more than it returned in productivity bonuses. In fact, it took a very long time before the PC made an unambiguous impact on productivity figures (mostly due to the economists not knowing how to best update their models).
After you hit 512MB of RAM, 1GHz, a 30GB disk drive, and a couple of 19" monitors it wasn't so much your PC holding you back as your own lack of anything to contribute. The driving urge to replace your crap PC every two years began to fade, and PC Magazine soon resembled Ally McBeal. The internet might have also contributed, but not as much as generally presumed. The two effects overlapped.
The formula for success during this era was to buy cheap and buy often. It's a direct consequence of exponential growth over short time frames (i.e. tax law amortization schedules).
There were three kinds of machines sold during this era: niche machines, elitist machines (Sun, N!XT, some Macs), and Wintel boxes. Of the elitist machines, the N!XT machine was the most orthographically challenged (and presciently ungoogleable). As great as the Amiga is purported to have been, it was never going to be all things to all people. As great as any of the other machines might have been, they were never going to be cheap enough to be all things to all people. The network effect takes over when you succeed at being all things to all people, excluding only the snobs, who don't wish to network with their inferiors in the first place.
Many of Microsoft's worst false steps were all about backward compatibility, which is legendary on the PC, but largely taken for granted. Sure it's easy to find counter examples out of a pool of 20,000 popular applications. If you're the kind of person that thinks one terrific counter example amounts to an argument, I bet every PC you've owned has come from the elitist camp. Those of us with elitist tendencies would have preferred Windows to be *less* compatible with the crap of yesteryore.
I have trouble faulting Microsoft for optimizing themselves to fit the niche which lead to their incredible commercial success, so far as they stayed within unbending legal parameters. (Unbending was not in the MS competitive lexicon at any point during Bill's reign of terror.)
There was one idea along the way that Microsoft regarded as particularly toxic to their vision of future success: the ability to roll-back or replicate a stable system configuration. Horrors! This could lead to resurrecting software whose license had since expired, or otherwise controlling the components in a fleet wide deployment image, with the potential exclusion of Microsoft's flavour of the day technology. Double horrors!
Microsoft has always practised forced bundling so that every person who upgrades their PC automatically gets the new MS crap, so they can then brag about their dominant install base, which gets the hardware vendors on side, etc.
The Windows registry was never about simplifying computer management. It was always about making custom installation images so difficult you needed an enterprise scale IT department to pull it off. This is a scale where the problem can be solved by political means: expensive lunches for pow
No it's not legal to drive 45 MPH in the "passing lane". In fact it's not even really legal to "drive" in the passing lane.
But you're only allowed to pass *at or under the speed limit* irrespective of what lane you're driving in.
Where I live, I've been painted many times at 100 kph in an 80 kph zone and never been pulled over. Don't like my chances getting painted at 105 kph. 20 kph over is the forgiveness limit around here.
So if I'm maintaining +20 kph over the speed limit in the left lane, am I passing or not passing? I'm usually passing a car in the right lane every ten seconds or so. Half the time there's a bigger, more powerful vehicle trying to butt-fark me from behind, thinking I'm not already far enough over the speed limit. I let these guys around me about a mile before the known speed traps, after they're good and heated up about not passing me sooner.
I found your post extremely interesting from a sociology perspective. A lot of logic around lane driving customs (rarely if ever enforced by the police) and very little logic around the speed limit, always enforced by the police within customary parameters.
I think it's a poor analysis that the left lane is reserved for the quasi-exclusive use of whichever driver has the greatest contempt for the speed limit. It's this kind of thinking that makes customs an interesting study.
Here's a man who bought a basketball team to indulge his anger management issues. Part of a Nowiztki quote in Wikipedia:
The game starts, and he's already yelling at [the referees]. So he needs to know how to control himself a little.
Maybe he gets himself warmed up driving to the arena in the latest Veyron coup. Just what a man with a short fuse needs to pump his fast twitch into adrenaline shock.
Out of the red tinged mental miasma of throbbing carotids, a word condenses: blackswan. (No particularly close relationship to black death.) "Hey, I can really push a lot of buttons swinging around this scabid corpse." With the economy in its current condition, we're all pretty hopped up on lemming pheromones and ready to jump. We're primed for the primal message.
This is a man who was energized by Ayn Rand. I was never able to read this chick, although I have read some excruciatingly long retrospectives about her via AL Daily. Whatever her virtues (views on this are extremely polar), she wielded a world-class stupid-dozer. Not the kind that pushes stupid out of the way, but the kind that backfills with dirt something she otherwise couldn't deal with. IIRC (more than twenty years later) in the early going of "For the New Intellectual", she tosses the work of Heisenberg and Gödel into the brink as the "philosophy of depression". Having thus dispatched with the facts, she then proceeds to unfold the truth. I didn't continue reading.
There's a funny moment in this TED video where Hawkins lampoons the old "maybe the brain can't understand the brain" mysticism. (And IMO, he's largely right about the role of the cortex in memory and prediction.) Jeff Hawkins on how brain science will change computing
Gödel was one of the first to demonstrate that for math this voodoo sentiment is in fact true, if your math is sufficiently powerful (i.e. with blades sharper than a Fischer Price lawn mower). Gödel's theorem is what makes mathematics a limitless frontier of new discovery.
Likewise, Heisenberg's uncertainty principle is intimately linked with almost every accomplishment of the high tech industry over the last 50 years. The statistical properties of bosons and fermions are not an obstacle to technology, but in fact enable the greatest feats of human creativity and magic we've managed to pull off. Rand, perched high atop her stupid dozer, didn't have time for subtlety, hence her great appeal to business minds. She implicitly believed that a simpleton universe would provide greater outlets for human creativity and triumph. What a ninny. But this was long before the clue stick was widely distributed, and a lot of people fell for it on an emotional level.
I think Rand deserves an honorary doctorate in media studies. She would be best regarded as a Marshall McLuhan figure, minus the self-insight part. If you needed to know what Fox news was going to be like in the 21st century, the author you needed to study fifty years ago was Ayn Rand.
Enter Mark Cuban with his media empire based on sports, entertainment, and ego, pumped around the globe over satellites and optical fibre made possible by the philosopher's of depression, now jamming open the elevator door with his elbow firmly planted on the fear button, prominently labelled black swan.
Did someone once remark that ego is the thin layer that demarcates fear from greed? Someone should have. The most powerful egos are found in the people where fear and greed press hardest together. I once sat in a room where a petty venture capitalist (with anger management issues) wrote onto our white board (in foot tall letters) two words: fear and greed; he then left this great wisdom behind for our continued edification. The implication, of course, was that if our inner emotional world had room for anything else, we would be regarded as insufficiently focused, and that wealth,
What I love about slashdot is its scalability. The discussion ranges anywhere from the design of a Google data center in 2015 to some guy's psychological stance toward his next netbook purchase in 2009. Sometimes it's unclear which end of the spectrum is under debate, but the discussion happily progresses in a state of astral superposition. When this gets too confusing, even for slashdot, the moderation system helps to sort things out. For example, if the comment
Flash memory is set to replace rotational media.
is moderated +1 insightful, then we know we're talking about some guy's future netbook purchase. Or if the same comment is moderated -1 troll, then we know we're talking about Google data centers in 2015.
"The scaling laws are not favourable to flash," said Tom Lee, an associate professor of electrical engineering at Stanford University and a founder of Matrix Semiconductor, which makes a 3D memory chip that performs flash-like functions. "The noises are getting louder now, so it looks like manufacturers are already in that new age of diminished gains."
"Numonyx engineers overcame major scaling limitations by developing new process techniques to produce the 7th generation MLC NOR flash on the industry's most advanced 45nm technology, and to be the first to bring the cost and performance benefits to our customers." ... "At a time when the entire industry grapples with the scalability of all flash memory technologies,..."
I think Brewster Kahle is going to jump off a bridge when he learns that Seagate is exiting the disk drive business in 2010. If you think CERN or EOS cost a lot of money, try updating the budget with SSD specified as the primary storage layer.
A useful way to view this transition is the long tail on steroids. 99% of the world's stored information will be held by a few hundred mega-scale institutions (NASA, Google, CERN, GenBank) on rotating hard drives, while 99% of the world's gadgets have no hard drive at all.
The same thing happened in software. The C language represents a tiny sliver of source code written over the last ten years, but if you could measure the number of machine instructions executed by language of origin, C would continue to represent a very large slice of the pie. A major factor in the success of scripting languages is that the problems these languages don't handle well can be off-loaded to a well established compiled language. If you cherry pick your niche, it's amazing how much more convenient it looks compared to the ancestral technology which didn't.
I thought the paper was quite good, and more relevant than 99% of what I read these days. I'm always interested in analysis of hybrid solutions. In the engineering world, there is a de facto allergy to hybrid solutions. We tend to achieve the best result by scaling a single virtue to the max, rather than engaging in the jello-like trade-offs involved in balancing complementary virtues. I first began to think about this when ethernet trounced ATM by the simple measure of vastly over-provisioning bandwidth.
The exception to this is on the large scale where operational costs exceed all other costs, such as major data centers.
This is one of the reasons why progress in ecology is so painfully achieved: ecological systems almost always demand hybrid solutions, and we're not terribly comfortable with this. Engineers prefer monarchy. In ecological systems, life is complicated, and you can't just sit there and
environmental puritans are often opposed to safe and effective means of disposal of nuclear waste
I would tend to parse those comments as demonstrating poor listening skills.
There's a certain kind of person who divides a debate into factions and then argues in terms of the silliest things said on either side. It's usually easy to spot the polarizers in any debate, they tend to lead with labels (e.g. "puritan").
I've discussed environmental issues with a hundred different people, all of whom had different opinions on the subject, and none as silly as the one you quote. I've overheard the kind of silliness you quote in a public hot tub on the other side of town. Disturbed me enough that I no longer visit that pool. I was waiting for their discussion of the environment to segue into Uri Geller, but I lacked the stomach to stick it out to collect on bet with self.
I don't know anyone on the green side of the debate who would concede that "safe and effective storage of nuclear waste" has yet been achieved. Nor do I know anyone on the hard science side of the debate who thinks that "safe storage" of nuclear waste is a slam dunk.
The latest estimate puts the cost of research, construction and operation of the geologic repository over a 150 year period - from when work started in 1983 through to the facility's expected closure and decommissioning in 2133 - at $96.2 billion (in 2007 dollars).
Surprisingly similar time line to Duke Nukem Forever, but with public expense dialed up to 11.
The draft budget removes funding for the planned nuclear-waste storage facility in Nevada, which has been 20 years and more than $9 billion in the making. A Department of Energy spokeswoman told Bloomberg that President Obama and Energy Secretary Steven Chu "have been emphatic that nuclear waste storage at Yucca Mountain is not an option, period."
It's just the crazy puritans who are unconvinced by a $9 billion dollar dry hole? If you kick a straw man in the testicles, does he go "oooff"?
What's pretty clear about safe storage is that we don't yet have an option where the party who advocates the solution is still around to clean up the mess if the whole thing goes south after billions of dollars of mostly public money is spent. That should give any pragmatic person cause to pause and think.
In any debate there will be factions (on both sides) who make a point of pride of their ignorance and who become more invested in the drama of the debate than the merits of the final outcome. It's absolutely true that I wish upon these people that their obstreperousness boomerangs and smacks them in the face. There's nothing profound about it, it's just a way to deal with a disheartening reality while plugging away for something better.
Ebert said much the same thing, if you read between the lines.
"Ill bet you hated to change your mind," I was told. No, I was happy to. It is a hard and frustrating thing to make a movie, and credit must be given where due.
Your ode to pharmaceutical schadenfreude is way overstated.
Good life strategy: if you truly don't understand something, and you're not interested in learning, make a joke about it. Those who laugh identify themselves as your peers, while the rest of us will (normally) engage in a silent shunning so you'll never have to confront the anguish of feeling uniformed.
Not knowing the difference between a block cipher for bulk encryption and a public key cipher for key exchange is on par (in this neck of the woods) with not knowing the difference between a debt and a deficit, or the difference between mass and weight. You might wish to append finance and physics to your note to self.
What I don't get is your mirth circuit determined that a discussion on a cryptographic attack was in need of a mirth tweet, as if this kind of thread isn't drowning in misinformation/misunderstanding 99% of the time.
Around the advent of Netscape, I briefly dabbled in an online MUD of the tedious variety. In the name of realism, your character had to sleep a lot. The game did have one good feature. You would go "con bartender" (short for "consider kicking bartender's ass") and the game would respond "you wet your pants" if you were hopelessly outclassed.
It's amazing how much of this thread is about action, and how little about traction. The Seligman video I watching this morning on TED discusses how psychiatry is devoted to getting people from -infinity (suicidal) to zero (empty, but not distressed); there hasn't been much study about how to get people from zero to something better.
A lot of the advice here is from the -infinity to zero camp: having none to having some. You could end up with someone you're not very well suited to, who doesn't really see you for who you are (see the "mold like putty" post), and with few emotional skills to make a relationship last more than three months.
Women have finely tuned sensors about men who are posing for effect. If a woman doesn't have this skill, she's nothing but trouble herself.
90% of success in relationships comes from listening skills, mostly of the non-verbal variety. The safest place to start an intimate conversation with a women you don't know very well is about her relationships: family members or close friends. If you have the knack of non-verbal communication, you'll pick up many small clues from body language during the rambling chit-chat. Note that most women tend to be peace-makers at heart, so if a chick is rambling endlessly about a relationship and your head is starting to spin from all the mindless detail (e.g. dress colour selection as a bridesmaid) there is usually some relationship tension hiding in there.
The next step is to engage the emotional clues you're getting with your own emotional content. It's hard to ask sensitive questions if you sound like you're filling out an insurance claim form. It works better to go "I was listening to you the other day and I started to get this feeling, so I started to wonder if there was more to your story." The first five words will catch most women off guard, the rest of it is fairly non-directive, and the woman will regard it as a small trophy that you, as a man, admit to having emotional responses. She'll want to affirm your bravery by telling more of the story.
Even if I pose this as a bit of gambit, you're best off being completely authentic. Note that this is hard, delicate work. Inauthenticity is a kind of lie, and lies become hard to remember.
If you're not insulting with your content, don't be too afraid of occasional conflict. Women tend to seek resolution, so you're almost certain to be given a chance to redeem yourself. At this point, be gentle, but act like you have a backbone. As much as women will try to mold you, they get cranky if they have too much success at this. At the end of the day, you can't rely on putty.
Women tend to be more straightforward about their emotions with their close friends than their romantic partners. Another detail it is important to bear in mind is that women experience the same range of emotions as men, including dark emotions of anger and hostility, but they tend to dress it up differently, and the rules are complicated about when this can be openly discussed (with some women, never, but these are not choice companions).
No matter how good you become with your communication skills, your biology is down there shuffling the deck, making things at the surface confusing as hell. Women tend to assume that if you're not confused by your emotions at some point, you aren't fully invested. A little bit of volatility proves you're alive. So don't be afraid once in a while to venture off script.
In the long run your sanity will be much improved if you reach the state of being where you can say "vive la différence" about all this heartache and really mean it.
The number one predictor of a successful romance is shared value systems, and the number one predictor of a successful long term relationship is emotional engagement. Eventually, even great sex becomes a matter of psychology and emotion, and for that, you need to find something in yourself worth sharing.
At its core, socialism is a removal of individual consequences for individual actions.
at its core, the sentiment behind this sentiment is that it is rational to lie, cheat, steal, and lounge around the couch if you can get away with it. I've read some reports lately that individuals with right wing belief systems have heightened neurological activity in the fear and disgust circuits. It strikes me as plausible, but nowhere near firmly established.
I tend to think that people with a well nourished sense of self-esteem are intrinsically motivated to pursue an engaged and meaningful life.
Is it naive socialism to believe in human potential? There's no question here that people kicked to the margins will engage in despicable behaviour, or that most of the people doing the kicking will be extremely well groomed.
If we're going to continue kicking people to the margins, we'd better have individual consequences for individual actions, because there's going to be a lot of people behaving badly.
The real question for me is whether a different social order is possible which doesn't require so much old-testament bravado to keep the wheels of justice turning.
It is funny and very telling of the real goal of pharma companies, that despite (or because of) all our "technology", the human immune system now is the weakest in the whole animal kingdom.
Wow. What we have here is a total collapse of the cognitive immune system responsible for thinking before typing.
Over all I think the human brain is a remarkable organ, but some of its failure modes defy rational analysis. Six billion counter examples. Maybe it's hard to count to six billion with your fingers.
The point is that the single metric of this test, though in a way useful, is not the best way to measure performance.
There's a difficult position: that more is better, on the back of the free work of others.
Maybe the point should be whether this test measured the most useful value given the amount of effort invested in the test, or whether they should have bothered at all, if this was the most they could manage.
From a cost/benefit perspective, I think there's enough value in what was accomplished *despite* these uncertainties. That said, if they could have managed to repeat this test run after yanking out a 2GB memory stick, that would be extremely informative as to how these browsers respond in a reduced memory circumstance, and how much of their memory use under large memory conditions was speculative.
Just last week my commit charge on my XP system at work was in 4GB territory with 3GB of RAM installed. I had ten FF windows scattered over nine desktops. Four of the desktops had Eclipse workspaces open, plus sundry office junk, but none of my big memory hogs, such as R, running large jobs. I don't think memory consumption is a non-factor yet, for small values of yet.
Let's back up for a moment and look at the big picture. I remember, all too vividly, back in the mid 1990s when one of the all-time favourite MS bashing memes was "no matter how large you make the hard drive, the next version of Microsoft 95/98/NT and Office would immediately expand to fill it up." In the minds of many teenage fanboys, the primary virtue of Linux was that it would run well on a 500MB hand-me-down disk drive.
The fact of the matter is the many of those early versions of Windows were highly compressed and curtailed, at great effort, to run well at all. As hard drive capacities increased (along a completely predictable trend line) Microsoft stopped bothering with the suitcase packing tricks, and allowed the software to expand to its natural size, somewhere between 4 and 10 GB. Shock, horror!
In the minds of many fanboys, software bloat makes an appearance on the end-of-civilization top-ten list. For about a year, which didn't stop a lot of people from posting on web discussion pages a very tired meme for years afterwards, as badly dated as rotary phones and bell-bottom pants. Sadly, I had to conclude that MS bashing causes brain rot.
Back to the present. Browser memory consumption is going to follow the same inclined hockey stick. Even with a migration toward Google apps.
Fast forward two years from now, as the economy comes out of the tank, and large build-out of corporate desktops with an 8 GB standard memory install, this discussion will be as quaint as wondering whether the upcoming Windows 2000 will install successfully on a 40GB hard drive.
Earlier this month I priced a 12GB memory kit for a Core i7 system at USD$180 street (name brand). At 12GB, making the jump to a 64-bit OS is a no-brainer, as you're way past the pointer-size penalty.
A much bigger factor in browser performance is how well these browsers exploit the available cores.
For the netbook segment, it boils down to power efficiency: you don't really want to fire up eight cores to render compressed images every time the user presses the page down key, so the major impact of good memory caching will show up less in response time and more in power consumption.
(Footnote concerning FF on multiple desktops. I absolutely *love* the FF FireTitle add-on. Press CTRL-; and it prompts you for a Window name, which becomes visible at the front of the process tab. The downside is that session saver doesn't capture the assigned window names so every time Adobe snafus FF, I have to assign all my window names over again. Nor does my session saver remember my window assignments under my multidesk client. Nor does Adobe remember its own session data, which is utterly incredible considering how often Adobe *deliberately* requires a restart to install patches. What I would give for a Chrome PDF viewer to smarten these guys up.)
IF you're going to argue that Word has every feature a user might need, that it is Turing complete as a pixel to page layout engine, you also need to deal with the halting problem: is there a finite, deterministic interaction with Word that achieves the desired outcome? If not, the end states that Word purports to implement are computationally intractable for a mere mortal to obtain.
Word is a state machine. The user must cajole the state machine to the desired end state by Twisteresque feats of clicking and tapping. I generally find Word to consist of more snakes than ladders.
It's likely that sound can be detected in space with the use of laser microphones. The sound won't be conducted through space, but that doesn't mean the ejecta isn't quivering, or that the quivering can't be neurologically assimilated.
Lexical processing is Google's Achilles heal. It's a royal pain when search results come back which silently discard odd-duck search terms. Try searching for "SAMe". Interesting, today for the first time, Google actually has a correct lexical match as the top result. The other day I had a search term where a punctuation mark was a critical disambiguator. That didn't work too good.
One that I beat my head against all the time is electronic component part numbers. The full, full, full part number using ends in six alphabetic digits which describes the production variant, right down to what the production engineer ate for breakfast that morning. It's kind of like net, net net, and net net net in real estate. (Interestingly, today Google returns pages titled "triple-net" for a search on "net net net". Another small improvement behind the scenes.) You'll often get the net net part name in distributor's catalogues, but if you want the data sheet, you often need to search on the just the root of the part, if you can guess which prefix stem that might be.
Of course, what you really want is to search on AT91SAM7* or AT91* depending on whether the programming technique in question applies to one part or the extended family.
And please, for the love of God, when I type in the part number which I know in advance is correct for the datasheet I'm seeking, return at least *one* authoritative hit in the top ten from the actual company that makes the part in question (by the billions, in some cases). Argh!!!! Argh!!!!!! Argh!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! Some vendors manage to place themselves in the top ten for their own parts, most don't. What's the problem? Is serving up your own data sheet too much like support and not enough like sales? Are these companies deliberately detuning their search results? The situation baffles me.
It's my daily sports fix hitting that little "vaporize into the cloud" button on top scoring results from alldatasheets.com which teases but doesn't deliver.
I suspect its not zero cost to extend Google to fully handle the long, long, long tail of variously truncated designator strings.
Another one: when I type "R" I mean the R language. Always. Get over it. If Google is going to gather my click trail, there's the one main thing they need to digest on my behalf. Thousands of queries over on r-seek and they still don't get it, usually discarding the term "R" entirely if it doesn't fit their prebuilt result for the companion search terms. +R doesn't work well either, as it forces Google to return every document index with an "R" subsection.
This is something that no software application has yet achieved. It's the baby Turing test. Identify three to ten personal-style hot buttons of the particular user, and then *don't do them*.
Instead, we've invented the world's shortest short bus: the software watches me replace with the original text the auto-correct garbage just inserted by Word (if I'm in for a bout of self-flagellation) or some other high-function IDE, and then auto-correct restores the thing I just manually deleted. Several times in a row, in a pique of futility. Isn't that the technical definition of a failed marriage?
If the Unabomber says to you "don't do that", while making eye contact for the first time in a decade, does it register? For Microsoft products, hardly ever. For Google, not quite enough.
I'm not taking any other version of the Turing test seriously until this one is dispatched.
First, you brush up on your Ferengi and check out Kraixlist on subspace ISM to see if any civilization wishes to anex a freshly vacated class M planet.
let there be pipes
on
Unix Turns 40
·
· Score: 3, Interesting
I've encountered bits and pieces of Unix hagiography for the last 15 years, and in all that time, I've internalized that "Multics sucks" (somewhere alongside the virgin birth), yet I can't bring to mind a single reason *why* Multics sucked. Were the Romans really so stupid as they are made out to be?
From Fernando J. Corbató's 1991 Turing lecture concerning one of Muttlix's early teething problems:
The decision to use a compiler to implement the system software was a good one, but what we did not appreciate was that new language PL/I presented us with two big difficulties: First, the language had constructs in it which were intrinsically complicated, and it required a learning period on the part of system programmers to learn to avoid them; second, no one knew how to do a good job of implementing the compiler.
So, perhaps, not the best suited language for systems programming? From Wikipedia:
The goal of PL/I was to develop a single language usable for both business and scientific purposes.
Doesn't that vision give your average PHB a throbbing chum? If simplicity is hard, let's scale up the mediocre talent and do sameness instead.
PL/I was designed by a committee drawn from IBM programmers and users drawn from across the United States, working over several months.
No sociology experiment from the 1960s was complete without confederates in white shirts. The free-love hippies managed to sneak into the language promiscuous data type conversions.
PL/I --"the fatal disease"-- belongs more to the problem set than to the solution set.
God, I love this guy. He's the patron saint of annoying the hell out of people by always being right, and putting a fine point on it. Same monograph includes another famous zinger:
APL is a mistake, carried through to perfection. It is the language of the future for the programming techniques of the past.
Dennett tries to talk intelligently about the problem, but it's not easy, and in my opinion, he doesn't always compel.
He's right about the vulnerability of children. By that token, the breakfast cereals industry is also treading on culthood through their television advertising tactics.
I would be much happier with society if we eliminated advertising targeted at the malleable minds of young children. We could introduce our children to the joys of commerce at puberty, along with pimples, and their myriad treatments.
I've just never seen a good explanation of the difference of a cult and a religion that doesn't boil down purely to the difference in number of believers.
Is is so surprising that sometimes distinction is by degree?
The Catholic sacrament contains a mild neurotoxin. The sacrament of the Peoples Temple Agricultural Project contained potassium cyanide. I'm not finding it hard to make the cut.
I don't like the idea of a Google monoculture any more than I like the Windows monoculture and the instant widespread success of malware that it enables
You're getting your ecology of monoculture mixed up.
Jurassic era reptilian monoculture was a cold-blooded concentration of biomass with distributed control. Malware at the periphery can not be overridden by the very tiny and very very greedy brain at the center.
The new monoculture features a greatly expanded brain case and a closely thermoregulated metabolism. Short term malware outbreaks are possible, but soon stomped out by the all-powerful centralized immune system.
The reptilian monoculture is now adapting to twerp and sprout wings. Hope they're content with a steady diet of worms.
Meanwhile, there's a whole host of new problems associated with the greatly expanded brain case.
That's a great post. Even if everything you say is wrong or outdated, it's still a great post. By the time I get all the right answers to the points you raised, I'll know a great deal about the subject that distinguishes experts from dilettantes.
This entire thread is better than average, yet I'm nevertheless somewhat stunned at the number of people equating accessible with good, bloated with bad.
A C program filled with assert() statements is more bloated than a C program without them. I guess it's partly a matter of whose dime is funding the learning process. If you're a student, shooting yourself in the foot with Verilog's fast and loose approach is a good learning experience (according to some posters here). They might be right.
In my case, as an experienced developer shipping products to customers on a tight schedule without dedicated test resources, I'd rather not discover what Verilog allowed me to get away with after the product has already shipped. I know a lot about hardware, yet I have little formal experience with either VHDL or Verilog. Ultimately the customer doesn't care if my language of choice was bloated or not. I didn't write the VHDL component of this project myself, but I will end up maintaining it.
Not sure what to make of the convenient C-like Verilog syntax. I guess engineers get away with uniglot more than the average programmer these days. Does the VHDL formalism occupy so much mental bandwidth that it impedes critical thinking and design? I tend to think that on a hardware project, critical thinking is close to the critical path. Am I naive? Are there aspects of hardware design akin to writing a throw-away app in Visual Basic?
The last time I regarded syntax as a serious impediment was wrestling with a DSSSL style sheet. I wouldn't program in a language for eight hours a day with a syntax I actively disliked. These days this isn't much of a practical constraint, since I rarely program in a single language for more than a day or two at a go. It's been 15 years since I would eat, sleep, breathe a single programming language.
I'm also a bit shocked at the number of people who prefer playing fast and loose with integer sign conversions. I tend to want to shoot C programmers who think that way. It's bad enough that addition of two unsigned quantities is not monotonic (without size extension). And that's *before* confusion about sign type creeps in.
The surprise for me is that up until now, I had heard more about SystemC than System Verilog, which seems to be about 100 times more important. Hey, I learned something today on slashdot. Not quite sure where to file that.
Slashdot Mirror
The problem with Vonnegut's "Man Without a Country" is that you can't tell when he's kidding.
He says "The arts are not a way to make a living. They are a very human way of making life more bearable. Practising an art, no matter how well or how badly, is a way to make your soul grow, for heaven's sake. ... Do it as well as you can. You will get an enormous reward. You will have created something."
The problem which arises when we attempt to turn the arts into a way of making a living, is that the larger social context breaks down. We make art out of our experiences. If your experiences are effectively owned by another party, you can make art out of your experiences, but then you won't entirely own the end result. Not even enough to give it away.
The soul-growing aspect of art is not its consumption, but the creative synthesis which art inspires. Art consumed is popcorn and butter. Nourishing in a caloric sense, but not nutritious.
At the risk of quoting a spoiler, Vonnegut recites the wisdom of his friend Saul at the end of the book, "what you respond to in any work of art is the artist's struggle against his or her limitations."
Thus, I suppose, breaking DRM is a form of art, and our response is to the plight of the artist's prison term.
But seriously, if you view the creative works of others as fuel for your own soul-growing endeavours, it's not sensible to become emotionally invested in creative works which are militantly encumbered.
Somewhere I encountered an anecdote about children given an amazing toy, but what they end up playing with most at the end of the day is the packaging the toy came in. I don't know anyone who was inspired to a life of artistic expression by the Mona Lisa. For that matter, it's debatable whether sex is improved with skill. Isn't skill mostly a compensation for the fact that the sequel rarely lives up to the original?
We're actually pretty bad at predicting our happiness states. Gilbert says the same thing in his videos at TED.
Why We Suck at Predicting the Future.
What I'm saying is that we too often talk ourselves into needing the latest and greatest (and most encumbered) media, but we don't, and it often defeats the greater purpose.
Lessig has figured out that this quandary is harming our children. Part of his motivation here is that we're making an ass of the law. I guess I have less to lose if RIAA succeeds, as seems likely.
Larry Lessig on laws that choke creativity
The deeper problem here is that many of us believe that we garner status through what we've experienced, rather than what we've created, a sentiment which Twain noted when he observed that "A classic is something everybody wants to have read, but no one wants to read."
How much of this stuff are we hurtling through so that we can sit around at the bar or the coffee shop and go "yeah, I've seen that; yeah, I've read that; yeah, I've seen that, too"?
I've been to Holland. I spent two hours in Schiphol. I've been to Tokyo. I spent 12 hours in the Narita complex. We had long enough to take a train into the city and drink one beer.
Sometimes we get a bit carried away with the belief that a gadget from Amazon or an air terminal is the gateway to a life well lived. If you don't stick around and engage emotionally, it's all meaningless. The Kindle model is a form of literary tourism. Hey, if you love airport security, here's a chance to carry it around on your person.
Flash forward to Kubrick's AI when the love of our life disappears in an electronic instant (with full refund) due to a minor copyright glitch on the charming dimple module. I've love to read the verse Shakespeare might have penned concerning that scenario, but as things are shaping up, I'd have to live another 600 years to legally post it here on slashdot.
In an ideal world, I suppose, 386BSD would have been managed better and there would be no forks.
In your "ideal world" I suspect we would all be rather less well off.
I've never understood the appeal of one-size-fits all. Why is it the premise of so many off-the-cuff comments in every venue of discussion?
So far as I can see, it accomplishes two things: makes it easy to criticize others for not getting along, and relieves the commentator of having to learn or understand systems theory, which is subtle and difficult. If only the whales had not split off from the carnivorous ungulates, evolution, in the ideal world, would have accomplished so much more. Put into a real context, the idea barely parses.
Within the prokaryote kingdom, there is a great deal of horizontal gene transfer. Within the BSD clade, there is a great deal of horizontal transfer (of ideas and code) whenever the need arises.
horizontal gene transfer
The most profound fork is probably the GPL from the long-standing conventions of public domain, which the BSD license more nearly mimics.
I don't see much difference between the scope of source code and the scope of human interpersonal relationships. In an ideal world, we would all be better off if either A) all information was private, or B) all information was public. Turns out, some people have information they don't wish to share (for a list of reasons which includes every human motivation) so the GPL lacks universal appeal. Turns out, some people have information which they don't wish other people not to share, so neither does the BSD license have universal appeal.
Having the two license camps puts a crimp on horizontal transfer, but it hasn't caused the world to stop turning. Is it fundamentally a bad thing to implement an idea twice, beginning from two different sets of premises? Only if your goal is world domination. For maximizing insight, diversity rocks.
I could continue, but I'm sure the choir has already figured this out, and the sinners are set in their ways.
At the end of the day, fork has become a term of social derision founded upon a monolithic Garden of Eden which never existed, and wouldn't have been a paradise even if it had.
If the only reason to fork is that two parties can't get along (X, libc are possibilities, but I don't know enough of the story) then forking is a mite unseemly, much like a failed marriage. Do open source communities fork more often than any other walk of life? I suspect not. And no, I'm not counting whiner attrition, where one or two guys copy a code base into their own tree, make a dozen patches, and are never heard from again. Does IBM fork every time a deadbeat is fired or quits?
Many of these projects have accomplished things through volunteer collaboration that twenty years ago few would have believed possible, yet they are mostly criticized in retrospect for the occasional loud public spat prior to a parting of ways, by people who are deeply in touch with their inner primate.
Those of us in the results oriented camp are less inclined to praise the false nirvana of pretending to agree when you really don't.
For an interesting comparison, consider the disputes over the years within NASA over the "smaller, faster, cheaper" engineering meme.
Small Is Beautiful, But Big Is Necessary
I suspect smaller, faster, cheaper might work, but it won't ever be NASA who consistently pulls this off. NASA is what you get when an agency never forks. Ideal leaves a lot to be desired.
Lost is not being used as an adjective anymore in this statement. Lost is now being used as an identifier, a name for, the tapes. The only purpose of calling them the lost tapes is to differentiate them from the other tapes they previously had.
And you know what, this is all completely obvious to anyone who never completed grade school. There's something about how grammar is first taught in elementary and junior school that leads to the kind of delayed-onset petulant pedanticism where someone regaining a "lost tape" is cited as logically inconsistent.
Any normal person makes the map from "lost tape" to "tape that was lost" a hundred times a day in the course of normal social relationships. Even people not regarded as representing the fat part of the Bell curve. Kasparov said some silly things about Deep Blue, but he never went around making absurd comments on language like some kind of cyborg dialed up way past Cmdr Data for propositional logic.
The lost coin is found, the lost sheep regathered, the lost son returns. Except in The Changeling, which is a difficult movie to watch. Had to keep track of fact that "lost son" meant different things to different people in almost every scene. Amazing the mind doesn't completely melt down in the face of so much contradiction. The only character whose mind was completely unclouded by ambiguity was the doctor in the psychiatric ward. I wouldn't risk use of the phrase "lost tapes" in the company of that man. His M.O. was that any ordinary ellipsis or circumlocution was a treasonable psychosis. He'd fit in well here.
Yes, the purpose of bubble sort is to prove theorems. I recall reading that bubble sort was introduced as an *optimal* algorithm on a Turing machine. Yet schools manage to teach bubble sort without commenting on its odd status, as if it one of the sorting methods found in every programmer's tool box. I haven't written a bubble sort once in two decades. Quick sort, heap sort, radix sort, and insertion sort are the real work horses.
Speaking of radix sort, a wise CS student puts an asterisk beside the claim that the algorithmic complexity of sorting is O(N log N). While this is formally true, the merits of "formally true" in this case are greatly overstated.
If you look at the ratio of L1 cache size to physical memory on almost any machine made in the last thirty years, you'll find that for sorting a list of primitive scalar elements (machine integers, pointers, or floating point) you almost never need more than a 3-pass radix sort.
A 16kB L1 cache will hold 2^11 long integers. A three pass radix sort is good for up to 2^33 elements. A 64kB L1 cache increases your three-pass list size to 2^45 elements. The day you install your first 1TB memory stick, do you think your L1 cache will be smaller than 64K? Any takers?
The performance of radix sort on any practical machine is as follows:
O (N log (N, base=N^(1/k))) = O (k N)
where k is usually 2 or 3, and hardly ever greater than 4 (for the situations where radix sort is preferred), unless you are talking about a class of machine never constructed where bubble sort is theoretically optimal.
Theory is good, but hone your BS detector.
Also, bear in mind that if your CS detector poses the exam question, as one of my Waterloo instructors once did, to draw circles, squares, and triangles around the automatic, static, and heap based allocations in a C program according to the convention on page 200 of your mandatory text book, the only thing your instructor is teaching you is what's easiest for him to test.
That text book was crap, I never cracked the cover once after I dismissed it, so I didn't know that the circle is the universal conceptual designation of a static variable.
One factor is whether the syllabus is conceptual or applied, the other factor is whether the teaching itself is meaningful or a meaningless exercise in jumping hoops.
I was arguing that we'd have been better off if Microsoft hadn't dominated it, teaching everyone to expect crappy software.
Interesting, if not particularly insightful. And potentially naive.
It's quite possible that during the exponential phase of the PC revolution, that "race to the bottom" was the dominant economic paradigm, and the winner, whoever it turned out to be, was the corporation to first or most deeply grasp this central economic fact.
To make this discussion concrete, IMO the exponential adoption phase concerns the period of time from the early 386 through to a low-end Athlon running Windows 2000.
Prior to the 386, people bought PCs more on potential than reality. It was a skill you wanted to have to stay in business a year or two down the road, but in fact it probably cost more than it returned in productivity bonuses. In fact, it took a very long time before the PC made an unambiguous impact on productivity figures (mostly due to the economists not knowing how to best update their models).
After you hit 512MB of RAM, 1GHz, a 30GB disk drive, and a couple of 19" monitors it wasn't so much your PC holding you back as your own lack of anything to contribute. The driving urge to replace your crap PC every two years began to fade, and PC Magazine soon resembled Ally McBeal. The internet might have also contributed, but not as much as generally presumed. The two effects overlapped.
The formula for success during this era was to buy cheap and buy often. It's a direct consequence of exponential growth over short time frames (i.e. tax law amortization schedules).
There were three kinds of machines sold during this era: niche machines, elitist machines (Sun, N!XT, some Macs), and Wintel boxes. Of the elitist machines, the N!XT machine was the most orthographically challenged (and presciently ungoogleable). As great as the Amiga is purported to have been, it was never going to be all things to all people. As great as any of the other machines might have been, they were never going to be cheap enough to be all things to all people. The network effect takes over when you succeed at being all things to all people, excluding only the snobs, who don't wish to network with their inferiors in the first place.
Many of Microsoft's worst false steps were all about backward compatibility, which is legendary on the PC, but largely taken for granted. Sure it's easy to find counter examples out of a pool of 20,000 popular applications. If you're the kind of person that thinks one terrific counter example amounts to an argument, I bet every PC you've owned has come from the elitist camp. Those of us with elitist tendencies would have preferred Windows to be *less* compatible with the crap of yesteryore.
I have trouble faulting Microsoft for optimizing themselves to fit the niche which lead to their incredible commercial success, so far as they stayed within unbending legal parameters. (Unbending was not in the MS competitive lexicon at any point during Bill's reign of terror.)
There was one idea along the way that Microsoft regarded as particularly toxic to their vision of future success: the ability to roll-back or replicate a stable system configuration. Horrors! This could lead to resurrecting software whose license had since expired, or otherwise controlling the components in a fleet wide deployment image, with the potential exclusion of Microsoft's flavour of the day technology. Double horrors!
Microsoft has always practised forced bundling so that every person who upgrades their PC automatically gets the new MS crap, so they can then brag about their dominant install base, which gets the hardware vendors on side, etc.
The Windows registry was never about simplifying computer management. It was always about making custom installation images so difficult you needed an enterprise scale IT department to pull it off. This is a scale where the problem can be solved by political means: expensive lunches for pow
No it's not legal to drive 45 MPH in the "passing lane". In fact it's not even really legal to "drive" in the passing lane.
But you're only allowed to pass *at or under the speed limit* irrespective of what lane you're driving in.
Where I live, I've been painted many times at 100 kph in an 80 kph zone and never been pulled over. Don't like my chances getting painted at 105 kph. 20 kph over is the forgiveness limit around here.
So if I'm maintaining +20 kph over the speed limit in the left lane, am I passing or not passing? I'm usually passing a car in the right lane every ten seconds or so. Half the time there's a bigger, more powerful vehicle trying to butt-fark me from behind, thinking I'm not already far enough over the speed limit. I let these guys around me about a mile before the known speed traps, after they're good and heated up about not passing me sooner.
I found your post extremely interesting from a sociology perspective. A lot of logic around lane driving customs (rarely if ever enforced by the police) and very little logic around the speed limit, always enforced by the police within customary parameters.
I think it's a poor analysis that the left lane is reserved for the quasi-exclusive use of whichever driver has the greatest contempt for the speed limit. It's this kind of thinking that makes customs an interesting study.
Here's a man who bought a basketball team to indulge his anger management issues. Part of a Nowiztki quote in Wikipedia:
The game starts, and he's already yelling at [the referees]. So he needs to know how to control himself a little.
Maybe he gets himself warmed up driving to the arena in the latest Veyron coup. Just what a man with a short fuse needs to pump his fast twitch into adrenaline shock.
Out of the red tinged mental miasma of throbbing carotids, a word condenses: blackswan. (No particularly close relationship to black death.) "Hey, I can really push a lot of buttons swinging around this scabid corpse." With the economy in its current condition, we're all pretty hopped up on lemming pheromones and ready to jump. We're primed for the primal message.
This is a man who was energized by Ayn Rand. I was never able to read this chick, although I have read some excruciatingly long retrospectives about her via AL Daily. Whatever her virtues (views on this are extremely polar), she wielded a world-class stupid-dozer. Not the kind that pushes stupid out of the way, but the kind that backfills with dirt something she otherwise couldn't deal with. IIRC (more than twenty years later) in the early going of "For the New Intellectual", she tosses the work of Heisenberg and Gödel into the brink as the "philosophy of depression". Having thus dispatched with the facts, she then proceeds to unfold the truth. I didn't continue reading.
There's a funny moment in this TED video where Hawkins lampoons the old "maybe the brain can't understand the brain" mysticism. (And IMO, he's largely right about the role of the cortex in memory and prediction.)
Jeff Hawkins on how brain science will change computing
Gödel was one of the first to demonstrate that for math this voodoo sentiment is in fact true, if your math is sufficiently powerful (i.e. with blades sharper than a Fischer Price lawn mower). Gödel's theorem is what makes mathematics a limitless frontier of new discovery.
Likewise, Heisenberg's uncertainty principle is intimately linked with almost every accomplishment of the high tech industry over the last 50 years. The statistical properties of bosons and fermions are not an obstacle to technology, but in fact enable the greatest feats of human creativity and magic we've managed to pull off. Rand, perched high atop her stupid dozer, didn't have time for subtlety, hence her great appeal to business minds. She implicitly believed that a simpleton universe would provide greater outlets for human creativity and triumph. What a ninny. But this was long before the clue stick was widely distributed, and a lot of people fell for it on an emotional level.
I think Rand deserves an honorary doctorate in media studies. She would be best regarded as a Marshall McLuhan figure, minus the self-insight part. If you needed to know what Fox news was going to be like in the 21st century, the author you needed to study fifty years ago was Ayn Rand.
Enter Mark Cuban with his media empire based on sports, entertainment, and ego, pumped around the globe over satellites and optical fibre made possible by the philosopher's of depression, now jamming open the elevator door with his elbow firmly planted on the fear button, prominently labelled black swan.
Did someone once remark that ego is the thin layer that demarcates fear from greed? Someone should have. The most powerful egos are found in the people where fear and greed press hardest together. I once sat in a room where a petty venture capitalist (with anger management issues) wrote onto our white board (in foot tall letters) two words: fear and greed; he then left this great wisdom behind for our continued edification. The implication, of course, was that if our inner emotional world had room for anything else, we would be regarded as insufficiently focused, and that wealth,
If it's a dumb idea Symantec invented it.
Well then, that explains Trepanation, which had a remarkably high short-term survival rate.
Catherine Mohr: Surgery's past, present and robotic future
Run this video in reverse and substitute Symantec for surgery. Note: includes illustrations which Symantec does not normally release.
What I love about slashdot is its scalability. The discussion ranges anywhere from the design of a Google data center in 2015 to some guy's psychological stance toward his next netbook purchase in 2009. Sometimes it's unclear which end of the spectrum is under debate, but the discussion happily progresses in a state of astral superposition. When this gets too confusing, even for slashdot, the moderation system helps to sort things out. For example, if the comment
Flash memory is set to replace rotational media.
is moderated +1 insightful, then we know we're talking about some guy's future netbook purchase. Or if the same comment is moderated -1 troll, then we know we're talking about Google data centers in 2015.
Flash memory begins to fade - ZDNet.co.uk from 2005
"The scaling laws are not favourable to flash," said Tom Lee, an associate professor of electrical engineering at Stanford University and a founder of Matrix Semiconductor, which makes a 3D memory chip that performs flash-like functions. "The noises are getting louder now, so it looks like manufacturers are already in that new age of diminished gains."
Numonyx Breakthrough Delivers First 45nm NOR Flash Memory Chips from Jan 2009
"Numonyx engineers overcame major scaling limitations by developing new process techniques to produce the 7th generation MLC NOR flash on the industry's most advanced 45nm technology, and to be the first to bring the cost and performance benefits to our customers." ..."
...
"At a time when the entire industry grapples with the scalability of all flash memory technologies,
Brewster Kahle
I think Brewster Kahle is going to jump off a bridge when he learns that Seagate is exiting the disk drive business in 2010. If you think CERN or EOS cost a lot of money, try updating the budget with SSD specified as the primary storage layer.
A useful way to view this transition is the long tail on steroids. 99% of the world's stored information will be held by a few hundred mega-scale institutions (NASA, Google, CERN, GenBank) on rotating hard drives, while 99% of the world's gadgets have no hard drive at all.
The same thing happened in software. The C language represents a tiny sliver of source code written over the last ten years, but if you could measure the number of machine instructions executed by language of origin, C would continue to represent a very large slice of the pie. A major factor in the success of scripting languages is that the problems these languages don't handle well can be off-loaded to a well established compiled language. If you cherry pick your niche, it's amazing how much more convenient it looks compared to the ancestral technology which didn't.
I thought the paper was quite good, and more relevant than 99% of what I read these days. I'm always interested in analysis of hybrid solutions. In the engineering world, there is a de facto allergy to hybrid solutions. We tend to achieve the best result by scaling a single virtue to the max, rather than engaging in the jello-like trade-offs involved in balancing complementary virtues. I first began to think about this when ethernet trounced ATM by the simple measure of vastly over-provisioning bandwidth.
The exception to this is on the large scale where operational costs exceed all other costs, such as major data centers.
This is one of the reasons why progress in ecology is so painfully achieved: ecological systems almost always demand hybrid solutions, and we're not terribly comfortable with this. Engineers prefer monarchy. In ecological systems, life is complicated, and you can't just sit there and
environmental puritans are often opposed to safe and effective means of disposal of nuclear waste
I would tend to parse those comments as demonstrating poor listening skills.
There's a certain kind of person who divides a debate into factions and then argues in terms of the silliest things said on either side. It's usually easy to spot the polarizers in any debate, they tend to lead with labels (e.g. "puritan").
I've discussed environmental issues with a hundred different people, all of whom had different opinions on the subject, and none as silly as the one you quote. I've overheard the kind of silliness you quote in a public hot tub on the other side of town. Disturbed me enough that I no longer visit that pool. I was waiting for their discussion of the environment to segue into Uri Geller, but I lacked the stomach to stick it out to collect on bet with self.
I don't know anyone on the green side of the debate who would concede that "safe and effective storage of nuclear waste" has yet been achieved. Nor do I know anyone on the hard science side of the debate who thinks that "safe storage" of nuclear waste is a slam dunk.
From http://www.world-nuclear-news.org/WR-Yucca_Mountain_cost_estimate_rises_to_96_billion_dollars-0608085.html
The latest estimate puts the cost of research, construction and operation of the geologic repository over a 150 year period - from when work started in 1983 through to the facility's expected closure and decommissioning in 2133 - at $96.2 billion (in 2007 dollars).
Surprisingly similar time line to Duke Nukem Forever, but with public expense dialed up to 11.
From http://blogs.wsj.com/environmentalcapital/2009/02/26/nuclear-waste-yucca-mountains-scrapped-so-what-now/
The draft budget removes funding for the planned nuclear-waste storage facility in Nevada, which has been 20 years and more than $9 billion in the making. A Department of Energy spokeswoman told Bloomberg that President Obama and Energy Secretary Steven Chu "have been emphatic that nuclear waste storage at Yucca Mountain is not an option, period."
It's just the crazy puritans who are unconvinced by a $9 billion dollar dry hole? If you kick a straw man in the testicles, does he go "oooff"?
What's pretty clear about safe storage is that we don't yet have an option where the party who advocates the solution is still around to clean up the mess if the whole thing goes south after billions of dollars of mostly public money is spent. That should give any pragmatic person cause to pause and think.
In any debate there will be factions (on both sides) who make a point of pride of their ignorance and who become more invested in the drama of the debate than the merits of the final outcome. It's absolutely true that I wish upon these people that their obstreperousness boomerangs and smacks them in the face. There's nothing profound about it, it's just a way to deal with a disheartening reality while plugging away for something better.
Ebert said much the same thing, if you read between the lines.
http://rogerebert.suntimes.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20070507/COMMENTARY/70507001
"Ill bet you hated to change your mind," I was told. No, I was happy to. It is a hard and frustrating thing to make a movie, and credit must be given where due.
Your ode to pharmaceutical schadenfreude is way overstated.
Good life strategy: if you truly don't understand something, and you're not interested in learning, make a joke about it. Those who laugh identify themselves as your peers, while the rest of us will (normally) engage in a silent shunning so you'll never have to confront the anguish of feeling uniformed.
Not knowing the difference between a block cipher for bulk encryption and a public key cipher for key exchange is on par (in this neck of the woods) with not knowing the difference between a debt and a deficit, or the difference between mass and weight. You might wish to append finance and physics to your note to self.
What I don't get is your mirth circuit determined that a discussion on a cryptographic attack was in need of a mirth tweet, as if this kind of thread isn't drowning in misinformation/misunderstanding 99% of the time.
Around the advent of Netscape, I briefly dabbled in an online MUD of the tedious variety. In the name of realism, your character had to sleep a lot. The game did have one good feature. You would go "con bartender" (short for "consider kicking bartender's ass") and the game would respond "you wet your pants" if you were hopelessly outclassed.
> con mirth zeta function
You wet your pants!
Well, we can dream.
It's amazing how much of this thread is about action, and how little about traction. The Seligman video I watching this morning on TED discusses how psychiatry is devoted to getting people from -infinity (suicidal) to zero (empty, but not distressed); there hasn't been much study about how to get people from zero to something better.
A lot of the advice here is from the -infinity to zero camp: having none to having some. You could end up with someone you're not very well suited to, who doesn't really see you for who you are (see the "mold like putty" post), and with few emotional skills to make a relationship last more than three months.
Women have finely tuned sensors about men who are posing for effect. If a woman doesn't have this skill, she's nothing but trouble herself.
90% of success in relationships comes from listening skills, mostly of the non-verbal variety. The safest place to start an intimate conversation with a women you don't know very well is about her relationships: family members or close friends. If you have the knack of non-verbal communication, you'll pick up many small clues from body language during the rambling chit-chat. Note that most women tend to be peace-makers at heart, so if a chick is rambling endlessly about a relationship and your head is starting to spin from all the mindless detail (e.g. dress colour selection as a bridesmaid) there is usually some relationship tension hiding in there.
The next step is to engage the emotional clues you're getting with your own emotional content. It's hard to ask sensitive questions if you sound like you're filling out an insurance claim form. It works better to go "I was listening to you the other day and I started to get this feeling, so I started to wonder if there was more to your story." The first five words will catch most women off guard, the rest of it is fairly non-directive, and the woman will regard it as a small trophy that you, as a man, admit to having emotional responses. She'll want to affirm your bravery by telling more of the story.
Even if I pose this as a bit of gambit, you're best off being completely authentic. Note that this is hard, delicate work. Inauthenticity is a kind of lie, and lies become hard to remember.
If you're not insulting with your content, don't be too afraid of occasional conflict. Women tend to seek resolution, so you're almost certain to be given a chance to redeem yourself. At this point, be gentle, but act like you have a backbone. As much as women will try to mold you, they get cranky if they have too much success at this. At the end of the day, you can't rely on putty.
Women tend to be more straightforward about their emotions with their close friends than their romantic partners. Another detail it is important to bear in mind is that women experience the same range of emotions as men, including dark emotions of anger and hostility, but they tend to dress it up differently, and the rules are complicated about when this can be openly discussed (with some women, never, but these are not choice companions).
No matter how good you become with your communication skills, your biology is down there shuffling the deck, making things at the surface confusing as hell. Women tend to assume that if you're not confused by your emotions at some point, you aren't fully invested. A little bit of volatility proves you're alive. So don't be afraid once in a while to venture off script.
In the long run your sanity will be much improved if you reach the state of being where you can say "vive la différence" about all this heartache and really mean it.
The number one predictor of a successful romance is shared value systems, and the number one predictor of a successful long term relationship is emotional engagement. Eventually, even great sex becomes a matter of psychology and emotion, and for that, you need to find something in yourself worth sharing.
At its core, socialism is a removal of individual consequences for individual actions.
at its core, the sentiment behind this sentiment is that it is rational to lie, cheat, steal, and lounge around the couch if you can get away with it. I've read some reports lately that individuals with right wing belief systems have heightened neurological activity in the fear and disgust circuits. It strikes me as plausible, but nowhere near firmly established.
I tend to think that people with a well nourished sense of self-esteem are intrinsically motivated to pursue an engaged and meaningful life.
Martin Seligman on positive psychology | Video on TED.com
Is it naive socialism to believe in human potential? There's no question here that people kicked to the margins will engage in despicable behaviour, or that most of the people doing the kicking will be extremely well groomed.
If we're going to continue kicking people to the margins, we'd better have individual consequences for individual actions, because there's going to be a lot of people behaving badly.
The real question for me is whether a different social order is possible which doesn't require so much old-testament bravado to keep the wheels of justice turning.
It is funny and very telling of the real goal of pharma companies, that despite (or because of) all our "technology", the human immune system now is the weakest in the whole animal kingdom.
Wow. What we have here is a total collapse of the cognitive immune system responsible for thinking before typing.
Over all I think the human brain is a remarkable organ, but some of its failure modes defy rational analysis. Six billion counter examples. Maybe it's hard to count to six billion with your fingers.
Bonnie Bassler on how bacteria "talk" | Video on TED.com
* 10 times more bacterial cells in or on a human than human cells
* 100 times more bacterial genes in you or on you than human genes
So there it is. If our immune system was worth shit, it wouldn't permit all these freeloaders.
The point is that the single metric of this test, though in a way useful, is not the best way to measure performance.
There's a difficult position: that more is better, on the back of the free work of others.
Maybe the point should be whether this test measured the most useful value given the amount of effort invested in the test, or whether they should have bothered at all, if this was the most they could manage.
From a cost/benefit perspective, I think there's enough value in what was accomplished *despite* these uncertainties. That said, if they could have managed to repeat this test run after yanking out a 2GB memory stick, that would be extremely informative as to how these browsers respond in a reduced memory circumstance, and how much of their memory use under large memory conditions was speculative.
Just last week my commit charge on my XP system at work was in 4GB territory with 3GB of RAM installed. I had ten FF windows scattered over nine desktops. Four of the desktops had Eclipse workspaces open, plus sundry office junk, but none of my big memory hogs, such as R, running large jobs. I don't think memory consumption is a non-factor yet, for small values of yet.
Let's back up for a moment and look at the big picture. I remember, all too vividly, back in the mid 1990s when one of the all-time favourite MS bashing memes was "no matter how large you make the hard drive, the next version of Microsoft 95/98/NT and Office would immediately expand to fill it up." In the minds of many teenage fanboys, the primary virtue of Linux was that it would run well on a 500MB hand-me-down disk drive.
The fact of the matter is the many of those early versions of Windows were highly compressed and curtailed, at great effort, to run well at all. As hard drive capacities increased (along a completely predictable trend line) Microsoft stopped bothering with the suitcase packing tricks, and allowed the software to expand to its natural size, somewhere between 4 and 10 GB. Shock, horror!
In the minds of many fanboys, software bloat makes an appearance on the end-of-civilization top-ten list. For about a year, which didn't stop a lot of people from posting on web discussion pages a very tired meme for years afterwards, as badly dated as rotary phones and bell-bottom pants. Sadly, I had to conclude that MS bashing causes brain rot.
Back to the present. Browser memory consumption is going to follow the same inclined hockey stick. Even with a migration toward Google apps.
Fast forward two years from now, as the economy comes out of the tank, and large build-out of corporate desktops with an 8 GB standard memory install, this discussion will be as quaint as wondering whether the upcoming Windows 2000 will install successfully on a 40GB hard drive.
Earlier this month I priced a 12GB memory kit for a Core i7 system at USD$180 street (name brand). At 12GB, making the jump to a 64-bit OS is a no-brainer, as you're way past the pointer-size penalty.
A much bigger factor in browser performance is how well these browsers exploit the available cores.
For the netbook segment, it boils down to power efficiency: you don't really want to fire up eight cores to render compressed images every time the user presses the page down key, so the major impact of good memory caching will show up less in response time and more in power consumption.
(Footnote concerning FF on multiple desktops. I absolutely *love* the FF FireTitle add-on. Press CTRL-; and it prompts you for a Window name, which becomes visible at the front of the process tab. The downside is that session saver doesn't capture the assigned window names so every time Adobe snafus FF, I have to assign all my window names over again. Nor does my session saver remember my window assignments under my multidesk client. Nor does Adobe remember its own session data, which is utterly incredible considering how often Adobe *deliberately* requires a restart to install patches. What I would give for a Chrome PDF viewer to smarten these guys up.)
IF you're going to argue that Word has every feature a user might need, that it is Turing complete as a pixel to page layout engine, you also need to deal with the halting problem: is there a finite, deterministic interaction with Word that achieves the desired outcome? If not, the end states that Word purports to implement are computationally intractable for a mere mortal to obtain.
Word is a state machine. The user must cajole the state machine to the desired end state by Twisteresque feats of clicking and tapping. I generally find Word to consist of more snakes than ladders.
It's likely that sound can be detected in space with the use of laser microphones. The sound won't be conducted through space, but that doesn't mean the ejecta isn't quivering, or that the quivering can't be neurologically assimilated.
Lexical processing is Google's Achilles heal. It's a royal pain when search results come back which silently discard odd-duck search terms. Try searching for "SAMe". Interesting, today for the first time, Google actually has a correct lexical match as the top result. The other day I had a search term where a punctuation mark was a critical disambiguator. That didn't work too good.
One that I beat my head against all the time is electronic component part numbers. The full, full, full part number using ends in six alphabetic digits which describes the production variant, right down to what the production engineer ate for breakfast that morning. It's kind of like net, net net, and net net net in real estate. (Interestingly, today Google returns pages titled "triple-net" for a search on "net net net". Another small improvement behind the scenes.) You'll often get the net net part name in distributor's catalogues, but if you want the data sheet, you often need to search on the just the root of the part, if you can guess which prefix stem that might be.
Of course, what you really want is to search on AT91SAM7* or AT91* depending on whether the programming technique in question applies to one part or the extended family.
And please, for the love of God, when I type in the part number which I know in advance is correct for the datasheet I'm seeking, return at least *one* authoritative hit in the top ten from the actual company that makes the part in question (by the billions, in some cases). Argh!!!! Argh!!!!!! Argh!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! Some vendors manage to place themselves in the top ten for their own parts, most don't. What's the problem? Is serving up your own data sheet too much like support and not enough like sales? Are these companies deliberately detuning their search results? The situation baffles me.
It's my daily sports fix hitting that little "vaporize into the cloud" button on top scoring results from alldatasheets.com which teases but doesn't deliver.
I suspect its not zero cost to extend Google to fully handle the long, long, long tail of variously truncated designator strings.
Another one: when I type "R" I mean the R language. Always. Get over it. If Google is going to gather my click trail, there's the one main thing they need to digest on my behalf. Thousands of queries over on r-seek and they still don't get it, usually discarding the term "R" entirely if it doesn't fit their prebuilt result for the companion search terms. +R doesn't work well either, as it forces Google to return every document index with an "R" subsection.
This is something that no software application has yet achieved. It's the baby Turing test. Identify three to ten personal-style hot buttons of the particular user, and then *don't do them*.
Instead, we've invented the world's shortest short bus: the software watches me replace with the original text the auto-correct garbage just inserted by Word (if I'm in for a bout of self-flagellation) or some other high-function IDE, and then auto-correct restores the thing I just manually deleted. Several times in a row, in a pique of futility. Isn't that the technical definition of a failed marriage?
If the Unabomber says to you "don't do that", while making eye contact for the first time in a decade, does it register? For Microsoft products, hardly ever. For Google, not quite enough.
I'm not taking any other version of the Turing test seriously until this one is dispatched.
First, you brush up on your Ferengi and check out Kraixlist on subspace ISM to see if any civilization wishes to anex a freshly vacated class M planet.
I've encountered bits and pieces of Unix hagiography for the last 15 years, and in all that time, I've internalized that "Multics sucks" (somewhere alongside the virgin birth), yet I can't bring to mind a single reason *why* Multics sucked. Were the Romans really so stupid as they are made out to be?
From Fernando J. Corbató's 1991 Turing lecture concerning one of Muttlix's early teething problems:
The decision to use a compiler to implement the system software was a good one, but what we did not appreciate was that new language PL/I presented us with two big difficulties: First, the language had constructs in it which were intrinsically complicated, and it required a learning period on the part of system programmers to learn to avoid them; second, no one knew how to do a good job of implementing the compiler.
So, perhaps, not the best suited language for systems programming?
From Wikipedia:
The goal of PL/I was to develop a single language usable for both business and scientific purposes.
Doesn't that vision give your average PHB a throbbing chum? If simplicity is hard, let's scale up the mediocre talent and do sameness instead.
PL/I was designed by a committee drawn from IBM programmers and users drawn from across the United States, working over several months.
No sociology experiment from the 1960s was complete without confederates in white shirts. The free-love hippies managed to sneak into the language promiscuous data type conversions.
Dijkstra summed it up in 1975 with his monograph
How do we tell truths that might hurt?
PL/I --"the fatal disease"-- belongs more to the problem set than to the solution set.
God, I love this guy. He's the patron saint of annoying the hell out of people by always being right, and putting a fine point on it. Same monograph includes another famous zinger:
APL is a mistake, carried through to perfection. It is the language of the future for the programming techniques of the past.
From Myths about Multics
We wrote 3000 pages of the Multics System Programmer's Manual first, while waiting for the PL/I compiler.
That should strike a painful nerve in anyone who tried to adopt the C++ STL in 1994.
Ouch. Shipwrecked on the beach of half a programming language, fondling your monads.
Not half surprising that Thompson ended up carving his own canoe with a pen knife to escape.
Marketing people can DIAF.
I concur with your warm sentiment.
Build a man a fire, and he'll be warm for a day. Set a man on fire, and he'll be warm for the rest of his life.
-- possibly Terry Pratchett
it now includes a Turbo mode which bellows your pyre to get faster coking
Well, as bad as it sounds, it's more comprehensible than Draino packets.
I should have added a link to my original post.
http://www.ted.com/speakers/dan_dennett.html
Dennett tries to talk intelligently about the problem, but it's not easy, and in my opinion, he doesn't always compel.
He's right about the vulnerability of children. By that token, the breakfast cereals industry is also treading on culthood through their television advertising tactics.
I would be much happier with society if we eliminated advertising targeted at the malleable minds of young children. We could introduce our children to the joys of commerce at puberty, along with pimples, and their myriad treatments.
I've just never seen a good explanation of the difference of a cult and a religion that doesn't boil down purely to the difference in number of believers.
Is is so surprising that sometimes distinction is by degree?
The Catholic sacrament contains a mild neurotoxin. The sacrament of the Peoples Temple Agricultural Project contained potassium cyanide. I'm not finding it hard to make the cut.
I don't like the idea of a Google monoculture any more than I like the Windows monoculture and the instant widespread success of malware that it enables
You're getting your ecology of monoculture mixed up.
Jurassic era reptilian monoculture was a cold-blooded concentration of biomass with distributed control. Malware at the periphery can not be overridden by the very tiny and very very greedy brain at the center.
The new monoculture features a greatly expanded brain case and a closely thermoregulated metabolism. Short term malware outbreaks are possible, but soon stomped out by the all-powerful centralized immune system.
The reptilian monoculture is now adapting to twerp and sprout wings. Hope they're content with a steady diet of worms.
Meanwhile, there's a whole host of new problems associated with the greatly expanded brain case.
That's a great post. Even if everything you say is wrong or outdated, it's still a great post. By the time I get all the right answers to the points you raised, I'll know a great deal about the subject that distinguishes experts from dilettantes.
This entire thread is better than average, yet I'm nevertheless somewhat stunned at the number of people equating accessible with good, bloated with bad.
A C program filled with assert() statements is more bloated than a C program without them. I guess it's partly a matter of whose dime is funding the learning process. If you're a student, shooting yourself in the foot with Verilog's fast and loose approach is a good learning experience (according to some posters here). They might be right.
In my case, as an experienced developer shipping products to customers on a tight schedule without dedicated test resources, I'd rather not discover what Verilog allowed me to get away with after the product has already shipped. I know a lot about hardware, yet I have little formal experience with either VHDL or Verilog. Ultimately the customer doesn't care if my language of choice was bloated or not. I didn't write the VHDL component of this project myself, but I will end up maintaining it.
Not sure what to make of the convenient C-like Verilog syntax. I guess engineers get away with uniglot more than the average programmer these days. Does the VHDL formalism occupy so much mental bandwidth that it impedes critical thinking and design? I tend to think that on a hardware project, critical thinking is close to the critical path. Am I naive? Are there aspects of hardware design akin to writing a throw-away app in Visual Basic?
The last time I regarded syntax as a serious impediment was wrestling with a DSSSL style sheet. I wouldn't program in a language for eight hours a day with a syntax I actively disliked. These days this isn't much of a practical constraint, since I rarely program in a single language for more than a day or two at a go. It's been 15 years since I would eat, sleep, breathe a single programming language.
I'm also a bit shocked at the number of people who prefer playing fast and loose with integer sign conversions. I tend to want to shoot C programmers who think that way. It's bad enough that addition of two unsigned quantities is not monotonic (without size extension). And that's *before* confusion about sign type creeps in.
The surprise for me is that up until now, I had heard more about SystemC than System Verilog, which seems to be about 100 times more important. Hey, I learned something today on slashdot. Not quite sure where to file that.